OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Attribute2Font: Creating Fonts You Want From Attributes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Font design is now still considered as an exclusive privilege of professional designers, whose creativity is not possessed by existing software systems. Nevertheless, we also notice that most commercial font products are in fact manually designed by following specific requirements on some attributes of glyphs, such as italic, serif, cursive, width, angularity, etc. Inspired by this fact, we propose a novel model, Attribute2Font, to automatically create fonts by synthesizing visually-pleasing glyph images according to user-specified attributes and their corresponding values. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first one in the literature which is capable of generating glyph images in new font styles, instead of retrieving existing fonts, according to given values of specified font attributes. Specifically, Attribute2Font is trained to perform font style transfer between any two fonts conditioned on their attribute values. After training, our model can generate glyph images in accordance with an arbitrary set of font attribute values. Furthermore, a novel unit named Attribute Attention Module is designed to make those generated glyph images better embody the prominent font attributes. Considering that the annotations of font attribute values are extremely expensive to obtain, a semi-supervised learning scheme is also introduced to exploit a large number of unlabeled fonts. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves impressive performance on many tasks, such as creating glyph images in new font styles, editing existing fonts, interpolation among different fonts, etc.
Architectural Design Space for Modelling and Simulation as a Service: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Modelling and Simulation as a Service (MSaaS) is a promising approach to deploy and execute Modelling and Simulation (M&S) applications quickly and on-demand. An appropriate software architecture is essential to deliver quality M&S applications following the MSaaS concept to a wide range of users. This study aims to characterize the state-of-the-art MSaaS architectures by conducting a systematic review of 31 papers published from 2010 to 2018. Our findings reveal that MSaaS applications are mainly designed using layered architecture style, followed by service-oriented architecture, component-based architecture, and pluggable component-based architecture. We also found that interoperability and deployability have the greatest importance in the architecture of MSaaS applications. In addition, our study indicates that the current MSaaS architectures do not meet the critical user requirements of modern M&S applications appropriately. Based on our results, we recommend that there is a need for more effort and research to (1) design the user interfaces that enable users to build and configure simulation models with minimum effort and limited domain knowledge, (2) provide mechanisms to improve the deployability of M&S applications, and (3) gain a deep insight into how M&S applications should be architected to respond to the emerging user requirements in the military domain.
Differentially Private ADMM for Convex Distributed Learning: Improved Accuracy via Multi-Step Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is a popular algorithm for distributed learning, where a network of nodes collaboratively solve a regularized empirical risk minimization by iterative local computation associated with distributed data and iterate exchanges. When the training data is sensitive, the exchanged iterates will cause serious privacy concern. In this paper, we aim to propose a new differentially private distributed ADMM algorithm with improved accuracy for a wide range of convex learning problems. In our proposed algorithm, we adopt the approximation of the objective function in the local computation to introduce calibrated noise into iterate updates robustly, and allow multiple primal variable updates per node in each iteration. Our theoretical results demonstrate that our approach can obtain higher utility by such multiple approximate updates, and achieve the error bounds asymptotic to the state-of-art ones for differentially private empirical risk minimization.
Tiering as a Stochastic Submodular Optimization Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Tiering is an essential technique for building large-scale information retrieval systems. While the selection of documents for high priority tiers critically impacts the efficiency of tiering, past work focuses on optimizing it with respect to a static set of queries in the history, and generalizes poorly to the future traffic. Instead, we formulate the optimal tiering as a stochastic optimization problem, and follow the methodology of regularized empirical risk minimization to maximize the \emph{generalization performance} of the system. We also show that the optimization problem can be cast as a stochastic submodular optimization problem with a submodular knapsack constraint, and we develop efficient optimization algorithms by leveraging this connection.
Spatiotemporal Adaptive Quantization for Video Compression Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

JCT-VC HEVC HM 16 includes a Coding Unit (CU) level adaptive Quantization Parameter (QP) technique named AdaptiveQP. It is designed to perceptually adjust the QP in Y, Cb and Cr Coding Blocks (CBs) based only on the variance of samples in a luma CB. In this paper, we propose an adaptive quantisation technique that consists of two contributions. The first contribution relates to accounting for the variance of chroma samples, in addition to luma samples, in a CU. The second contribution relates to accounting for CU temporal information as well as CU spatial information. Moreover, we integrate into our method a lambda refined QP technique to reduce complexity associated multiple QP optimizations in the Rate Distortion Optimization process. We evaluate the proposed technique on 4:4:4, 4:2:2, 4:2:0 and 4:0:0 YCbCr test sequences, for which we quantify the results using the Bjontegaard Delta Rate (BD-Rate) metric. Our method achieves a maximum BD-Rate reduction of 23.1% (Y), 26.7% (Cr) and 25.2% (Cb). Furthermore, a maximum encoding time reduction of 4.4% is achieved.
Measuring and Characterizing Hate Speech on News Websites
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time, news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These features empower and enable discussions among the users; however, they also act as the medium for the dissemination of toxic discourse and hate speech. The research community lacks a general understanding on what type of content attracts hateful discourse and the possible effects of social networks on the commenting activity on news articles. In this work, we perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of 125M comments posted on 412K news articles over the course of 19 months. We analyze the content of the collected articles and their comments using temporal analysis, user-based analysis, and linguistic analysis, to shed light on what elements attract hateful comments on news articles. We also investigate commenting activity when an article is posted on either 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) or six selected subreddits. We find statistically significant increases in hateful commenting activity around real-world divisive events like the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and political events like the second and third 2016 US presidential debates. Also, we find that articles that attract a substantial number of hateful comments have different linguistic characteristics when compared to articles that do not attract hateful comments. Furthermore, we observe that the post of a news articles on either /pol/ or the six subreddits is correlated with an increase of (hateful) commenting activity on the news articles.
Artificial Intelligence Assisted Collaborative Edge Caching in Small Cell Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Edge caching is a new paradigm that has been exploited over the past several years to reduce the load for the core network and to enhance the content delivery performance. Many existing caching solutions only consider homogeneous caching placement due to the immense complexity associated with the heterogeneous caching models. Unlike these legacy modeling paradigms, this paper considers heterogeneous content preference of the users with heterogeneous caching models at the edge nodes. Besides, aiming to maximize the cache hit ratio (CHR) in a two-tier heterogeneous network, we let the edge nodes collaborate. However, due to complex combinatorial decision variables, the formulated problem is hard to solve in the polynomial time. Moreover, there does not even exist a ready-to-use tool or software to solve the problem. We propose a modified particle swarm optimization (M-PSO) algorithm that efficiently solves the complex constraint problem in a reasonable time. Using numerical analysis and simulation, we validate that the proposed algorithm significantly enhances the CHR performance when comparing to that of the existing baseline caching schemes.
Unsupervised Embedding-based Detection of Lexical Semantic Changes
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes EmbLexChange, a system introduced by the "Life-Language" team for SemEval-2020 Task 1, on unsupervised detection of lexical-semantic changes. EmbLexChange is defined as the divergence between the embedding based profiles of word w (calculated with respect to a set of reference words) in the source and the target domains (source and target domains can be simply two time frames t1 and t2). The underlying assumption is that the lexical-semantic change of word w would affect its co-occurring words and subsequently alters the neighborhoods in the embedding spaces. We show that using a resampling framework for the selection of reference words, we can reliably detect lexical-semantic changes in English, German, Swedish, and Latin. EmbLexChange achieved second place in the binary detection of semantic changes in the SemEval-2020.
Health Access Broker: Secure, Patient-Controlled Management of Personal Health Records in the Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Secure and privacy-preserving management of Personal Health Records (PHRs) has proved to be a major challenge in modern healthcare. Current solutions generally do not offer patients a choice in where the data is actually stored and also rely on at least one fully trusted element that patients must also trust with their data. In this work, we present the Health Access Broker (HAB), a patient-controlled service for secure PHR sharing that (a) does not impose a specific storage location (uniquely for a PHR system), and (b) does not assume any of its components to be fully secure against adversarial threats. Instead, HAB introduces a novel auditing and intrusion-detection mechanism where its workflow is securely logged and continuously inspected to provide auditability of data access and quickly detect any intrusions.
Revisiting Agglomerative Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

An important issue in clustering concerns the avoidance of false positives while searching for clusters. This work addressed this problem considering agglomerative methods, namely single, average, median, complete, centroid and Ward's approaches applied to unimodal and bimodal datasets obeying uniform, gaussian, exponential and power-law distributions. A model of clusters was also adopted, involving a higher density nucleus surrounded by a transition, followed by outliers. This paved the way to defining an objective means for identifying the clusters from dendrograms. The adopted model also allowed the relevance of the clusters to be quantified in terms of the height of their subtrees. The obtained results include the verification that many methods detect two clusters in unimodal data. The single-linkage method was found to be more resilient to false positives. Also, several methods detected clusters not corresponding directly to the nucleus. The possibility of identifying the type of distribution was also investigated.
Information-theoretic limits of a multiview low-rank symmetric spiked matrix model
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We consider a generalization of an important class of high-dimensional inference problems, namely spiked symmetric matrix models, often used as probabilistic models for principal component analysis. Such paradigmatic models have recently attracted a lot of attention from a number of communities due to their phenomenological richness with statistical-to-computational gaps, while remaining tractable. We rigorously establish the information-theoretic limits through the proof of single-letter formulas for the mutual information and minimum mean-square error. On a technical side we improve the recently introduced adaptive interpolation method, so that it can be used to study low-rank models (i.e., estimation problems of "tall matrices") in full generality, an important step towards the rigorous analysis of more complicated inference and learning models.
NeuroAttack: Undermining Spiking Neural Networks Security through Externally Triggered Bit-Flips
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Due to their proven efficiency, machine-learning systems are deployed in a wide range of complex real-life problems. More specifically, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) emerged as a promising solution to the accuracy, resource-utilization, and energy-efficiency challenges in machine-learning systems. While these systems are going mainstream, they have inherent security and reliability issues. In this paper, we propose NeuroAttack, a cross-layer attack that threatens the SNNs integrity by exploiting low-level reliability issues through a high-level attack. Particularly, we trigger a fault-injection based sneaky hardware backdoor through a carefully crafted adversarial input noise. Our results on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and SNNs show a serious integrity threat to state-of-the art machine-learning techniques.
Adaptive Influence Maximization: If Influential Node Unwilling to Be the Seed
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Influence maximization problem attempts to find a small subset of nodes that makes the expected influence spread maximized, which has been researched intensively before. They all assumed that each user in the seed set we select is activated successfully and then spread the influence. However, in the real scenario, not all users in the seed set are willing to be an influencer. Based on that, we consider each user associated with a probability with which we can activate her as a seed, and we can attempt to activate her many times. In this paper, we study the adaptive influence maximization with multiple activations (Adaptive-IMMA) problem, where we select a node in each iteration, observe whether she accepts to be a seed, if yes, wait to observe the influence diffusion process; If no, we can attempt to activate her again with a higher cost or select another node as a seed. We model the multiple activations mathematically and define it on the domain of integer lattice. We propose a new concept, adaptive dr-submodularity, and show our Adaptive-IMMA is the problem that maximizing an adaptive monotone and dr-submodular function under the expected knapsack constraint. Adaptive dr-submodular maximization problem is never covered by any existing studies. Thus, we summarize its properties and study its approximability comprehensively, which is a non-trivial generalization of existing analysis about adaptive submodularity. Besides, to overcome the difficulty to estimate the expected influence spread, we combine our adaptive greedy policy with sampling techniques without losing the approximation ratio but reducing the time complexity. Finally, we conduct experiments on several real datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed policies.
Distributed Bounded Model Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

Program verification is a resource-hungry task. This paper looks at the problem of parallelizing SMT-based automated program verification, specifically bounded model-checking, so that it can be distributed and executed on a cluster of machines. We present an algorithm that dynamically unfolds the call graph of the program and frequently splits it to create sub-tasks that can be solved in parallel. The algorithm is adaptive, controlling the splitting rate according to available resources, and also leverages information from the SMT solver to split where most complexity lies in the search. We implemented our algorithm by modifying CORRAL, the verifier used by Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier (SDV), and evaluate it on a series of hard SDV benchmarks.
A Deep Learning based Wearable Healthcare IoT Device for AI-enabled Hearing Assistance Automation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

With the recent booming of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning techniques, digital healthcare is one of the prevalent areas that could gain benefits from AI-enabled functionality. This research presents a novel AI-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) device operating from the ESP-8266 platform capable of assisting those who suffer from impairment of hearing or deafness to communicate with others in conversations. In the proposed solution, a server application is created that leverages Google's online speech recognition service to convert the received conversations into texts, then deployed to a micro-display attached to the glasses to display the conversation contents to deaf people, to enable and assist conversation as normal with the general population. Furthermore, in order to raise alert of traffic or dangerous scenarios, an 'urban-emergency' classifier is developed using a deep learning model, Inception-v4, with transfer learning to detect/recognize alerting/alarming sounds, such as a horn sound or a fire alarm, with texts generated to alert the prospective user. The training of Inception-v4 was carried out on a consumer desktop PC and then implemented into the AI based IoT application. The empirical results indicate that the developed prototype system achieves an accuracy rate of 92% for sound recognition and classification with real-time performance.
Imposing Regulation on Advanced Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

This book discusses the necessity and perhaps urgency for the regulation of algorithms on which new technologies rely; technologies that have the potential to re-shape human societies. From commerce and farming to medical care and education, it is difficult to find any aspect of our lives that will not be affected by these emerging technologies. At the same time, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, cognitive computing, blockchain, virtual reality and augmented reality, belong to the fields most likely to affect law and, in particular, administrative law. The book examines universally applicable patterns in administrative decisions and judicial rulings. First, similarities and divergence in behavior among the different cases are identified by analyzing parameters ranging from geographical location and administrative decisions to judicial reasoning and legal basis. As it turns out, in several of the cases presented, sources of general law, such as competition or labor law, are invoked as a legal basis, due to the lack of current specialized legislation. This book also investigates the role and significance of national and indeed supranational regulatory bodies for advanced algorithms and considers ENISA, an EU agency that focuses on network and information security, as an interesting candidate for a European regulator of advanced algorithms. Lastly, it discusses the involvement of representative institutions in algorithmic regulation.
From Boundaries to Bumps: when closed (extremal) contours are critical
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Invariants underlying shape inference are elusive: a variety of shapes can give rise to the same image, and a variety of images can be rendered from the same shape. The occluding contour is a rare exception: it has both image salience, in terms of isophotes, and surface meaning, in terms of surface normal. We relax the notion of occluding contour to define closed extremal curves, a new shape invariant that exists at the topological level. They surround bumps, a common but ill-specified interior shape component, and formalize the qualitative nature of bump perception. Extremal curves are biologically computable, unify shape inferences from shading, texture, and specular materials, and predict new phenomena in bump perception.
Hyperspectral Image Classification Based on Sparse Modeling of Spectral Blocks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Hyperspectral images provide abundant spatial and spectral information that is very valuable for material detection in diverse areas of practical science. The high-dimensions of data lead to many processing challenges that can be addressed via existent spatial and spectral redundancies. In this paper, a sparse modeling framework is proposed for hyperspectral image classification. Spectral blocks are introduced to be used along with spatial groups to jointly exploit spectral and spatial redundancies. To reduce the computational complexity of sparse modeling, spectral blocks are used to break the high-dimensional optimization problems into small-size sub-problems that are faster to solve. Furthermore, the proposed sparse structure enables to extract the most discriminative spectral blocks and further reduce the computational burden. Experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., Pavia University Image and Indian Pines Image verify that the proposed method leads to a robust sparse modeling of hyperspectral images and improves the classification accuracy compared to several state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed method requires less processing time.
Output sensitive algorithms for approximate incidences and their applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

An $ε$-approximate incidence between a point and some geometric object (line, circle, plane, sphere) occurs when the point and the object lie at distance at most $ε$ from each other. Given a set of points and a set of objects, computing the approximate incidences between them is a major step in many database and web-based applications in computer vision and graphics, including robust model fitting, approximate point pattern matching, and estimating the fundamental matrix in epipolar (stereo) geometry. In a typical approximate incidence problem of this sort, we are given a set $P$ of $m$ points in two or three dimensions, a set $S$ of $n$ objects (lines, circles, planes, spheres), and an error parameter $ε>0$, and our goal is to report all pairs $(p,s)\in P\times S$ that lie at distance at most $ε$ from one another. We present efficient output-sensitive approximation algorithms for quite a few cases, including points and lines or circles in the plane, and points and planes, spheres, lines, or circles in three dimensions. Several of these cases arise in the applications mentioned above.